When I play back video (say totem something.avi), the monitor (a Samsung LCD) attached to my external VGA port turns off and back on, as if synchronizing to a new mode. Not horrible, but annoying.
System info is same as in bug #13500. Might be related. :?

Yeah, our mode setting code disables outputs and CRTCs a bit too easily. We need some improvements there (may require server changes too).
Andreas, can you file a new bug for the framebuffer compression sluggishness problem? You can assign it to me.

Steps to reproduce:
1. Run totem. (no need to specify a movie file or anything)
My version of totem is 2.20.3. Trying this with a cheapo external LCD like mine probably helps. (a SAMSUNG SyncMaster 940B)
(fyi, by now i'm on debian version 2.2.1-1 of the driver)

That does away with the screen blanking. Nice.
However, while I don't really understand what those options do, it seems like they disable TV-Out, which I use occasionally. Do I have to take them out every time I want to use the S-Video port?

(In reply to comment #10)
> That does away with the screen blanking. Nice.
>
> However, while I don't really understand what those options do, it seems like
> they disable TV-Out, which I use occasionally. Do I have to take them out every
> time I want to use the S-Video port?
>
Yes, these options disable the TV output. I am afraid you have to remove these options when you want to use S-Vido.
The problem is: When you execute the xrandr tool, it will try to detect the status of each output. For the TV output, we must find a pipe (which is already used for your external monitor) for it to do a status detection. So your external VGA will be disabled at that time.
Nanhai, is there any other ways to do a TV output status detection?
Thanks,
Hong

Using ltrace, I found out that totem makes these two calls to Xrandr. Do these necessarily involve detecting whether a TV is connected?
XRRQueryExtension(0x80bced0, 0xbff4fa58, 0xbff4fa54, 0x8072d41, 0x841e0c0) = 1
XRRGetScreenInfo(0x80bced0, 151, 0xbff4fa54, 0x8072d41, 0x841e0c0) = 0x80c1ee0

(In reply to comment #4)
> When I switch back to the i810 driver, I do not see this issue with totem.
>
Does i810 driver support dual-head display? what is the xrandr -q output when using i810 driver.
I am afraid this issue will exist until we can find any other way to detect TV connection status.